Forecasting tourist arrivals with machine learning and internet search index

Abstract

The queries entered into search engines register hundreds of millions of different searches by tourists, not only reflecting the trends of the searchers' preferences for travel products, but also offering a forecasting of their future travel behavior. This paper proposed a forecasting framework based on internet search index and machine learning to forecast tourist arrivals, and compared the forecasting performance of two different search engines data, Baidu and Google. The empirical results suggest that the proposed KELM models by fusing Baidu index and Google index can significantly improve the forecasting performance and outperform other benchmark models in terms of forecasting accuracy.